“Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.”
Octavia Butler was a Black writer who pioneered and dominated the genre of science fiction. Born in 1947, Butler was shy and often picked on by her peers. Books and writing seemed to have become her escape and creative outlet. Butler lost her father at a young age and was raised by her mother, who once paid more than a month’s worth of rent for a chance for Butler’s story to be published. She would be the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the genius grant. Today, her most popular work is Kindred, a novel about time travel from 1976 to two hundred years in the past onto a plantation. According to the MacArthur Foundation, Butler “brought elements of African and African-American spiritualism, mysticism, and mythology to her novels and stories.” Whether it be science fiction, Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, or other themes in Butler’s works, she is a genius in every sense of the word. She was imagining new worlds and spaces that would uplift the Black narrative and future. Not only did Butler write about race, but also about sexuality, class, the environment, and so much more. Butler once said, “I began writing about power because I had so little.” Butler mostly wrote Black women as her protagonists in a time when most characters in science fiction were white men, written by white men. Butler’s works are not only rich with imagery and beautifully written, but they also discuss very real topics that we still experience today, through the narrative of marginalized communities.
This semester I am taking a class all about Octavia Butler and her many wonderful novels and stories, taught by Dr. Tabitha Lowery. In the syllabus for the class, it reads that without Butler, “we would not know Beyonce’s album Lemonade or even Janelle Monae’s album Dirty Computer as they are today.” Without Octavia Butler, we would not know Afrofuturism like we do. Jamie Broadnax wrote for HuffPost in 2018 that “Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural.” Broadnax goes on to say that “Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens” and that it is “steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity.” In my class with Dr. Lowery, we recently read Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession” where she says “I hid out in a big pink notebook-one that would hold a whole ream of paper. I made myself a universe in it. There I could be a magic horse, a Martian, a telepath. . . . There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these.” Butler, the godmother of Afrofuturism, carved worlds for herself and others like her to belong and thrive in.
According to Octavia Butler’s website, she rose early in the morning, often at two in the morning, to have time to write before going to work. Throughout her life, she worked various jobs such as a “telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher, among other things.” In her later years, she suffered from writer’s block and depression, but finished and published Fledgling, a novel about vampires, before her death in 2006.
We owe Octavia Butler a huge thanks and a great amount of support for all that she contributed to science fiction for Black women and people in America and around the world.
In one of her most well received novels, Parable of the Sower, Butler writes, “Embrace diversity. Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.”